ABOUT YOUR INSTRUCTOR, ADAM DOUGLASS
The short version: Adam Douglass has been teaching music for over 20 years. He has studied with Mike Stern, Wayne Krantz, and Bruce Bartlett; and is a published author of instructional guitar material. He has toured nationally with Tom Constanten (Grateful Dead/Jefferson Airplane), Charles Neville (The Neville Brothers), Scott Guberman (Phil Lesh and Friends), Kenny Brooks (Ratdog, Charlie Hunter Quartet), and Johnny Radelat (Gary Clark, Jr.). He performs his original music regularly around New York City with his eponymous band, The Adam Douglass Triage.
Teaching and playing the guitar isn’t just a hobby or a side-hustle for me, it’s my full-time career, and I am excited to be able to share my knowledge with a diverse roster of students on a daily basis.
My guitar playing journey began at age 13, and by the time I was old enough to drive I was sneaking into bars to sit in with my high school physics teacher’s cover band, which I eventually became a member of. In college, other students in my dorm would hear me practicing and throw me a few bucks for a guitar lesson, and the rest, as they say, is history.
In addition to the wonderful faculty at the University of Florida, I also studied with professors from the Musician's Institute (previously known as The Guitar Institute of Technology), and Berklee College of Music, including private study with Bruce Bartlett for my entire ten year tenure living in Boston.
While doing my intensive studies, I was also performing with various groups on the East Coast on every type of gig you could imagine: from Brazilian pop music, to funk and soul, weekly jazz gigs for 3 years, or classic rock cover bands, and for singer-songwriters.
I then started playing with a few Grateful Dead tribute bands and then wound up performing with Tom Constanten (their second keyboardist, who was also in Jefferson Airplane/Starship), Scott Guberman (who is now a member of Phil Lesh and Friends), and Grammy Award winning saxophonist Charles Neville. All of this study and playing with other bands was for the purely selfish reason of maintaining the creativity to write my own music, and I have several albums of original music available for download or as a physical CD.
I have never looked at playing the guitar as work or an obligation that I have to go through every day, I simply want to play guitar every day.
In doing it every day I found there were things I gravitated towards and things I did not, but I wanted to be good at it, so I still worked on the things I was not good at. And that is basically my teaching philosophy: If you can just love the simple act of creating music, no matter what level it’s happening on, everything else will fall into place.
That does require patience, but it’s not really patience if you enjoy existing in the moment that you are taking the time to create something.
When I am not busy teaching, practicing, or performing I continue my studies with acclaimed NYC musicians Mike Stern and Wayne Krantz (yep, even guitar teachers have guitar teachers, too!).